On Thursday, as part of a roadshow for his "all of the above" energy strategy, President Obama is scheduled to visit Cushing, Okla., home to the world's biggest oil storage complex. There he will tour a yard where TransCanada is storing pipes to be used in building the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline. The line will stretch from Cushing down to refineries on the Texas gulf coast.

It will be a strange and remarkable visit considering that Obama in January denied a permit for the northern section of the pipeline that would have crossed the Canadian border. The strangeness wasn't lost of Harold Hamm, the chief executive of Continental Resources, Mitt Romney's new energy advisor, and a first-rate oil tycoon, worth $11.5 billion by Forbes' most recent reckoning.

"It's so hypocritical and so ironic after everything he's tried to do against the industry," said Hamm in a phone interview with me today. "He's trying to take credit for all the gains we've made against the backdrop of the biggest oil storage complex in the world."

Take credit? Naw, the president couldn't be taking credit for this stretch of the Keystone XL, could he? After all, he must know full well that TransCanada got approvals to build the southern stretch months ago, and that pipelines that stay within U.S. borders don't need presidential approval anyway. Maybe someone forgot to tell Obama advisor David Axelrod. “This president has approved dozens of pipelines,” said Axelrod on CBS’s "Face the Nation." “So he’s certainly not hostile to transporting oil but we have to do it in an appropriate way.”

Isn't it more likely that the president is going to Cushing (as well as another stop to an oilfield in New Mexico) to bash oil? After all, it was just a couple weeks ago at a campaign stop in North Carolina that Obama dismissed oil as "the fuel of the past."

Maybe the president is going to Oklahoma to apologize for the comments of his actor friend Alec Baldwin (seen here with the Obamas at the White House correspondents dinner, May 2010). Over the weekend Baldwin tweeted that Oklahoma's pro-oil, anti-environmentalist Senator James Inhofe should be retired "to a solar-powered gay bar." Baldwin also tweeted, "Is there a bigger Oil Whore than James Inhofe?"

Maybe he wants to take credit for the mammoth gains in domestic oil and gas production in the past three years (oil production is up 20% to 5.8 million bpd)? No, that couldn't be the case either. The president knows full well that he had nothing to do with the development of oil and gas from shale reservoirs in Texas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and North Dakota. In fact, it's clear as day that the Obama administration thinks oil and gas companies should be drilling less, not more.

The EPA has been trying out various ways of asserting its limited authority under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act to regulate hydraulic fracturing. The Bureau of Land Management wants to increase fees and royalty rates charged to companies drilling on public lands. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has delayed a long-planned lease auction of forestland in Ohio, ostensibly to study fracking. And on Tuesday, after triggering outrage from farmers, the U.S.D.A. retracted its plan to force anyone with a mortgage guaranteed by the agency to seek an onerous federal environmental review before leasing their lands to oil and gas drillers. "It's schizophrenic," says Ken von Schaumburg, a former EPA administrator now advising drillers on fracking regulations with the law firm of Clark Hill in Washington. The aborted U.S.D.A. plan would have required anyone who wanted to lease their land for drilling to first seek a National Environmental Policy Act review, which can take years.

"All you have to do is look at his record the last three years," says Larry Nichols, chairman and co-founder of Oklahoma City-based Devon Energy. "Who wins this election will have a profound impact on American energy policy."

If President Obama thinks oil and gas development is something to encourage, then back in 2008 he wouldn't have pledged to levy a windfall profits tax on oil and gas companies of more than $15 billion a year. That tax hasn't materialized, but the rhetoric remains. In his radio address last Saturday, the president said that Congress should move to cut billions in oil and gas "loopholes." A congressional vote, he said, would put lawmakers on record as to whether they "stand up for oil companies" or "stand up for the American people."

It's an either/or, huh? Tell that to the oil-and-gas boom states of Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, Louisiana, or North Dakota, which has the lowest unemployment rate in the nation, and where there are thousands of jobs available working on the Bakken shale oil field. Harold Hamm's Continental Resources has the biggest position in the Bakken, where oil production has grown from a trickle a decade ago to surpass 500,000 barrels per day now. Last month North Dakota surpassed California as the state with the third-most oil production. Hamm says it will pass Alaska later this year.

Yet we know the Obama administration doesn't like oil drilling in the Bakken because last year the Department of Justice brought a criminal indictment against Hamm's Continental Resources (and other oil companies) over the death of a handful of migratory birds that apparently died in a wastewater pit. Nevermind that an estimated 100 million birds die each year from flying into windows. (A judge threw the case out.)

I can only guess that the president has a surprise in store for Thursday. A wild prediction: he will use his remarks in Cushing to explain that the U.S. economy needs oil and gas, that he's approving the entire Keystone XL--because no matter where they are laid, pipelines are a far safer way of moving crude than by truck or train. What's more, he will declare the entire Eastern Seaboard as well as the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge open to oil drilling. Whaddya think? Too alienating to his base?